DancingSamurai.ca

So we’re up for an election on Oct 14th here in Canada. Not many great choices, unfortunately, but this commenter to a globe and mail article is spot on re: Harper.

Stephen Harper does not need to lay out a plan for the country during this election, because Canadians have already seen his plan, and know it very well:

1. Reduce taxes for corporations and the wealthy. Placate non-thinking Canadians with surplus-eating policies that are token giveaways like dropping the GST by 1%.
2. Punish any critical media coverage by refusing access (the lifeblood of media) so you’re assured to get softball questions (like all of yesterday’s coverage).
3. Muzzle all your members so that no one can say or do anything that isn’t pre-approved.
4. Shut down any investigation as much as possible.
5. Lie about ethics, transparency, accountability while loudly trumpeting the opposite. Canadians won’t pay attention anyway.
6. Adopt U.S. Republican foreign policy and a war-mongering stance. The rest of the world’s opinion about Canada doesn’t much matter.
7. Claim you’ve got plans and agendas to address the most important issues facing Canadians – the economy, health care, climate change, education, but do nothing more than make those claims.
8. Get tough on crime by funding more jails, more law enforcement, more tasers. Improve social policies? Not needed, because if those kids didn’t commit crimes in the first place, they wouldn’t need the social policy improvements in the second place, and strong crime deterrence is the way to go.
9. Impede scholarship and freedom of speech by revising the Copyright Act according so that an out-of-touch industry is best served by an out-of-touch government. What’s that you want? Search and seizure of people’s computers and MP3 players at the border? Yes, sir, Mr. Bush!

And that’s not even mentioning his governments appeasment of the scripture-based social agenda of the religious right. Or the ‘opposition is picking on my character’, given the treatment it deserves here:

My goodness. Harper tries to scare up some victim credibility with a claim that the opposition is going to attack him personally – this on the heels of his media campaign to portray himself as a vulnerable, tender, sweater-vest wearing (hey – I thought professors wore sweater-vests?), minivan-driving innocent (he *loves* kids, yay! Not like those tax-and-spend, gay marriage loving, wife-swapping, child-hating “elitist” liberals!). Then, because he doesn’t have the courage to make the attack himself, sends his weasel-in-chief out to launch a cowardly attack on Dion personally. It would be dastardly and corrupt, if it weren’t so damnably mediocre. I’ve seen enough of George Bush. I don’t really need to see the sequel here in Canada.

Or here:

This, after all, from the leader of a party that mocked Jean Chrétien’s Bell’s palsy, a party whose followers make ceaseless fun of Stéphane Dion’s imperfect English, and are now trying to suggest that the Green Party is anti-Semitic. A party so keen on negative campaigning that it risks copyright violations. A party that attempted an Orwellian “fuelcast” propaganda blitz at the gas pumps. A party that gave us the memorable “evil reptilian kitten-eater from another planet” to describe the now Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty.

But to hear Harper tell it, it’s the Opposition that plays dirty: no one can claim that the man doesn’t have chutzpah.

Is anybody listening? How can people even think about voting for this guy (or his whipped mouthpieces who pretend to be local MPs)?

Possibly related posts:

1. Don’t buy into Harper’s Lies
2. Harper’s attacks on Democracy, documented.
3. More on Harper…
4. Premier Danny Williams on Harper
5. Politics